Dead people voting is a type of election fraud that occurs when the name of a deceased person remains on a state's official list of registered voters and a living person fraudulently casts a ballot in that name.

The extent to which this type of vote fraud occurs is not known. If, after an election, a reporter examines the publicly available list of who voted in the election and finds from other evidence (such as the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File") that there is good reason to believe that some of the names on the list of those who voted are the names of people who are dead, it can be established that "dead people voted." Such painstaking analyses are expensive and cumbersome.

It is easier to determine how many names of deceased people still appear on official voter registration lists than it is to determine how many (if any) actual votes were fraudulently cast in the name of a deceased person.

Some recent examples of elections in which actual fraudulent votes were cast on behalf of dead people include a 2005 state senate election in Tennessee that was decided by fewer than 20 votes; in this case, a post-election verification process established that two fraudulent votes were cast on behalf of dead people. Three election workers were indicted, and the results of the election were voided. The mayoral election in Miami in 1997 was nullified by a judge because of widespread fraud, including a number of established cases of fraudulent votes cast in the name of dead people. Election inspectors looking at the 1982 gubernatorial election in Illinois estimated that as many as 1 in 10 ballots cast during the election were fraudulent, including votes by the dead.[1]

When the Poughkeepsie Journal in New York did a 2006 analysis of how names of deceased people were still on New York's official list of registered voters, it conducted the assessment by matching "the names, dates of birth and ZIP codes of all listed voters in New York's database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File," a database of 77 million records of deaths dating to 1937." That study resulted in a final estimate of as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and that as many as 2,600 of them had cast votes from the grave.[1]

Dead people voting news by state

Please see below for recent news about dead people voting in the United States.

Alabama

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